The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [201]
Gay? Delighted? To lose me as a husband? I remembered Katherine’s agony, her insistence on keeping me as her spouse.
“She sent you this token.” Brandon took out a velvet pouch and produced her gold wedding band.
“Well, well,” was all I could say. Anne had agreed. I had won.
I gestured toward the darkened window. “Tomorrow I’ll sendOatlands, just a high-ceilinged chamber on the second storey, hung with hunting trophies. Stags’ heads and boars’ heads stared at us with their glass eyes.
Catherine and I sat side by side and laughed at everything. We laughed at Brandon when he stood up, cup in hand, and made a solemn toast about matrimony. He himself had been married four times, and had been one of the chamberers on my wedding-night public bedding with Katherine. It all seemed to come together now, all was one. We laughed, and we touched. And touched. O sweet Jesu! That touch!
We smiled at Cranmer’s gentle well-wishes. (And touched.) We clapped at the Lady Mary’s. (And touched, under the table, lest she see.) We bowed gravely at little Edward’s. He spoke three words in Latin, memorized for the occasion. And all the while the sun was lowering, making shadows on the rows in the grain fields outside. At last it set, but the interminable summer twilight lingered on and on, until I longed to order it to disappear.
At long last it grew dark enough in the feasting chamber for candles to be lit, then torches. It was time for our guests to take their leave, and so they did, with kisses and well-wishes. There was to be no ceremonial bedding this time. Like any wool merchant or soldier, I was free to take my bride to my bed unaided.
It was a new bed, purchased from a local magistrate in the nearby village of Weybridge. He had commissioned it from a London artisan, meant it for a grand guest chamber he had had in mind for a manor that never came about. It was of good English oak and agreeably carved, and quite large, in aping the nobility. It stood now in the royal Retiring Chamber, its great four-posts scraping against the sloping ceiling.
I led my sweet Catherine into the chamber, closing the snug, dark door behind me. It was passably dark in there, and the one lighted candle on the wooden chest danced in the billowing summer air. Two dormer windows gave out on the ripening fields. I made to close them. Catherine stopped me, putting her soft hand on my arm.
“On this my wedding night,” she said, “I would not be shut up and closed, as in a tomb. I would have a little breath of heaven, of the world beyond.”
“Whatever you wish,” I said. The windows remained open, and the grain-perfumed air came in, along with the cries of labourers and travellers on the road below.
I wish I could tell exactly what happened in the next few hours. I said thus-and-so. She said thus-and-so. We did thus-and-so. Yet although my senses were fully alert (no wine for either of us that night), I became so transported by her very presence that everything was altered, and I cannot separate one action from another.
It makes me angry that it is so. These were precious hours to me, hours that must now stand after all the nasty tide has swept in against them, and yet I cannot remember! I cannot remember cold details, only my own feelings, which were as strong as Hercules, but formless.
I was with her. I possessed her. She was mine. The very touch of her hand was a gift. A gift which felt simultaneously natural and precious beyond thought. The ordinary me, the true Henry, was not worthy of such a gift, but this special Henry was, the Henry I became in her presence.
All this was entirely natural, was it not? To hold her in my arms, to kiss her lips, to hear those words of endearment gasped out in jerks? The special Henry, the Henry and endowed with extraordinary graces (this Henry who was both me and not me, stranger and ever-known) —he felt at ease in this bliss, this homecoming.
I know she responded, created the Henry of whom I speak. In the fleeting moments in